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@pointsofpedagogy
what do you plan to do during summer?

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Guest Post: Incorporating Gender Equality Classes Into the Curriculum
We have here our second guest post; this time from Politics student,Anna Sanders. Though not a teacher herself, she assures me that she went to school a handful of times, and has prepared for us a piece on that oft-neglected topic in pedagogy:Â gender politics. Thereâll be more posts from my own notepad any day now.
 Iâve long been a proponent of incorporating gender equality classes into the curriculum. As a self-proclaimed feminist killjoy, I never hesitate to voice my opinion that sexism still covertly prevails in multi-faceted forms and has become normalised within our every day lives. Stereotyping gender roles, embedded in the depths of our culture, largely perpetuates sexist attitudes and upholds rather dated ideas that women and men should behave in certain ways. At school, my female peers and I were often subjected to the ever-so profound comeback of âget back in the kitchenâ, which we learned to accept as normal because we were never taught that sexism was wrong. Iâm sure we can all partly thank media outlets such as The Sun for demonstrating every reason why we still need feminism. Ladies: if we ever forget our self-worth, we can simply turn to Page Three as a reminder (or alternatively, check out The Sunâs disparaging article âthe Best of Breastminsterâ, where if youâre after an all-time classic of tasteless misogyny I guarantee this will be right up your street).
A study by Ambady et al. (2001) suggests that we develop these damaging gender stereotypes from a young age, which stick with us for the rest of our lives. The study found children as young as six developed the belief that boys are better than girls at mathematics, which pertains to a form of cognitive bias. Additionally, they found that âperformance is malleable to situational and psychological cuesâ. Therefore, if weâre told we are better at something from a young age, it could be that weâre more likely to advance in it. Is it then any wonder why 15% of the STEM workforce in the UK is female?
Since we learn our beliefs and values early on in life, perhaps one of the most fundamental methods to erode sexist thinking is through âthe most powerful weapon to change the worldâ â education. Hyde et al. (1990) found that childrenâs gender identity undergoes significant transformations as they approach adolescence, so there seems no better time to incorporate values of equality through a formal curriculum than at secondary school. One idea could be to incorporate gender equality classes within the PSHE programme in order to raise awareness of existing sociological disparities across society. Within these classes talks of women in leadership could be beneficial, or another option could be to develop initiatives for female students to continue education and career trajectories in areas where women are poorly represented, such as STEM subjects. Itâs been suggested that some sort of content review is needed of this subject already. Hell, Iâm in my twenties, I have no idea how to get a mortgage, but fortunately I have been taught not to sniff Pritt Sticks.
Anna is based in London and has a blog of her own, all about being a feminist killjoy. Check out her other astute observations over at http://theparitydebate.blogspot.co.uk/
Guest Post: No Use Crying Over Spilt Knowledge
Points of Pedagogy would like to welcome you to its first guest contributor: JB the Science Guy! Nice and anonymised, but recognisable to his friends.
Itâs a wonderful piece and follows presently:
Striking a work-life balanceâŠcontinued
We've had points 1-5 in an earlier post. Here, finally, is the remaining 5. No doubt there's a million more but these are things that have worked for me.
6 â Play the long game
This links back to point 3 (Donât feel guilty), but is worth bearing in mind. When worrying about anything in teaching, and perhaps in life but I havenât done the necessary legwork yet to check, itâs usually a good idea to think over a long time period. If thereâs a problem, itâs no use killing yourself over it to fix it straight away. Instead, watch a game of tennis. The greatest player in the history of the game at the time of writing is (almost indisputably) Roger Federer. Not the fastest, not the fittest and not the strongest, but through flawless technique and a brilliant mind he conquered tennis more than any other for a long time. While in his prime he came up against athletes like Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic who would get the better of him from time to time, Federerâs main strength, from what I can see, is his ability to play the long game. To understand that itâs entirely possible to lose an early break without expending excess energy, in the knowledge that he could save that energy for later. When it comes to a 5-set match, he would rarely be beaten*.
The Use of Memory Techniques in the Classroom
So there you are: youâve worked your proverbials off to deliver an outstanding lesson. Students were engaged, and there was progress all up in the joint. By the end, youâre convinced that every single one of those crazy cats has left the room stuffed full to bursting with nutritious education. But uh-oh, itâs only October and their exam isnât until June. What to do, what to do. Do you just give the same lesson again in 6 monthsâ time? Itâs a dilemma every teacher faces up to come revision time.
âHow could they have forgotten about self-actualisation?! They couldâve written a thesis on it in January!â

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Harnessing Competition in the Classroom
This is perhaps the blog post which most assured me that I should be writing separately away from the official blog of my school. You'll probably see why that is by the end.
People are competitive. Itâs how weâre programmed, how weâre raised, and how we succeed. I wonât get too Desmond Morris on you with the anthropology, but it stands to reason that competitive traits are adaptive in helping us to survive, and therefore flourish in any successful species.
Striking a work-life balance
It is now July 2014 and I am an NQT at a low-achieving but highly ambitious comprehensive in North London. Over the last 2 years or so of teaching, I feel Iâve learnt a surprising amount about the difficulties in striking a work-life balance. I am of course still a young teacher, and I have no children to raise or a family to support, so by all means ignore anything that I could possibly have to say about genuine struggle.
Most of my advice and observations will probably be of more relevance to fellow NQTs and similar, but I would like to be of as much use as possible even to more experienced teachers.
Now, the overworked, underpaid, underpraised and underappreciated teacher is one of the biggest clichĂ©s of our profession. That the British public, and seemingly half of the cabinet, regard us with something approaching disdain merely adds to our feelings of righteous self-pity. I could, and almost did, write another post entirely about getting past the pig-headed public perception, but letâs just take it as read that you are big enough and strong enough to take their tabloid-induced prejudices. Our next challenge then is overcoming our own workload, for our own sake not to mention that of our students.
I donât need to tell you that teachers are overworked. What I can tell you however, is one or two ways of dealing with that workload â some from my own limited experience, and others Iâve picked up elsewhere. What was it Tuco says in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly? âIf you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working? â
1 â Give yourself some personal time
Hopefully you were advised to do this during your training, but itâs something worth repeating. Give yourself some personal time. For some, this means having a set window in which you must not work. It could be your Saturday afternoons, your Friday evening or your Wednesday lunchtime. For others itâs about deciding there and then that you wonât work that evening. Whatever the weather, and whatever your To Do list demands, this time is sacred.
So, you might ask, what should you do in this time? Well this leads us to point 2:
2 â Get a hobby
The biggest temptation after a busy day/week/term/career is to do absolutely nothing; to switch off. This is one of my favourite things to do. But donât switch off. Do you know how many millions of years of evolution it took to switch you on? Let sleep help you to restore the batteries, donât waste your waking life. So once youâre done for the day, do something new, something that awakens a part of you that teaching doesnât. For me, itâs football and occasionally spoken-word poetry. For you, it might be embroidery, it might be hiking, or it might be writing outrageous obscenities on ÂŁ5 notes. Whatever it is, enjoy it! This leads me to point 3:
3 â Donât feel guilty
When I first started taking my personal time and playing football a couple of times a week, all I could think about was the pile of marking I had to do, or tomorrowâs double that Iâve not quite planned. My advice is to just forget about it. If youâve decided that this is your personal time, then take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Of course weâre highly accountable professionals and we should hit every deadline we can; we should be aiming for Outstanding every time. But guess what, we still only have 24 hours in a day and we are no use to anyone if we suffer burnout. If itâs your personal time, then it is your personal time whether or not you spend it worrying.
So how do you achieve Outstanding, and keep your sanity? (side note: Iâm not an Outstanding teacher, but Iâve long suspected that this is how they do it).
4 â Find methods that work, and re-use them
I am currently Teacher in Charge of Psychology (by virtue of being the only Psychology Teacher) or, as I like to think of it: The *default* Head of Psychology Department. This gives me an enormous freedom over schemes of work, lesson plans, unit combinations and so on. It also means Iâve had to plan everything on my own so far. I love this freedom and wouldnât like shared classes, but it puts a certain pressure on me to come up with a wide variety of teaching techniques and lesson formats. What I learned to do towards the end of the year, when my creative juices were drying up, was to recycle techniques Iâd used earlier in the year and repackage them. Donât think, I reasoned, that just because youâre teaching the same class for 150 hours in a year that each hour has to be unique. In fact, some routines can be invaluable. If you find the perfect starter or plenary format, then feel free to use this in every single lesson. During my observations this month Iâve noticed this very strongly in the MfL department, and I would recommend it across the board. This will save you untold hours or planning time over the course of a year. Speaking of whichâŠ
5 â Find alternative teaching techniques which require minimal preparation
Weâve all been there: you spent more time than youâd care to mention on a resource (be it a worksheet, a wall display or an elaborate Whodunit?) only to be greeted by a class of ungrateful swines who didnât even realise that you are the one who had to make it. So you bottle up the rage and the regret and you add it to the growing stomach ulcer of resent that youâve naturally accumulated as a teacher. By all means continue creating wonderful resources â most classes will appreciate them and theyâre wonderful to have in your repertoire. But if workload is becoming a problem, then limit it to once or twice a week. Find techniques which put the emphasis on them, the learners. Iâm sure there are 50 books full of tips on this side, so Iâll just leave you with one recommendation: Jim Smithâs The Lazy Teacherâs Handbook. Youâll find a sample here: http://www.lazyteacher.co.uk/samplelazyteacher.pdf
6-10 To be continuedâŠ
Introduction to the blog
Hello all, near and far, and welcome to my new blog.
Introductions: So, I'm an A-Level Psychology teacher at an academy in North London, which recently launched its own blog. I'm a young teacher, freshly QTS'd up and I contribute to my school blog now and then, but given its close ties to an actual institution in a religiously conservative area I can't fully express my thoughts in the way I might prefer so I've set up a little blog of my own.
This means I won't pull any punches, and will be fairly honest with my frames of reference. To further ensure that there are no issues of unprofessionalism, safe-guarding or slander I won't make explicit reference to any schools, students or staff members.
Otherwise, have a browse. The blog will generally focus on practical discussion and the odd meagre titbit of advice from my incredibly limited experience in the profession. Sometimes it will be observations, sometimes it will act as a journal or ranting space, and sometimes there might be links to useful resources. Usually things will be upbeat, but I can't guarantee how I'll feel in three months' time...